Monday, February 18, 2013

A typical visit to the California Academy of Sciences in San
Francisco involves checking out the albino alligator, the Indo-Pacific reef
exhibit, the living roof of the new green building, and dazzling
planetarium.All well worth a visit!

What a great location!

But for a taxonomist it is a completely different
experience.Behind the scenes museums
hold millions of biological and geological specimens.The fruits of recent biodiversity surveys and
environmental impact studies, as well as samples collected from famous and
not-so-famous historical expeditions.

Just one row of cabinets
in the Mollusc collection

In many cases materials donated to museums have
not yet been sorted and identified to species.
The shortage of experts and budgetary constraints mean that most museums
do not have enough personnel to identify the flood of incoming samples, let
alone update the existing collections every time there is some kind name change
or taxonomic update. So when taxonomists are in town they always spend a few days looking for hidden treasures in the collections. And of course, helping out the overworked curatorial assistants and collection mangers.In January I spent a couple of days working on the calyptraeid
samples at the CAS. Check out the draws
of unidentified Crepidula. The Bostrycapulus
were pretty easy to sort out. I just published a revision of the genus. And the collection team had the labels printed on archival paper
in a flash.

I started with the species

I've revised most recently.

There were 3 draws full of un-indetified Crepidula alone!

Each lot is in a single box. With a label and any revisions, like my updated species name.

The next day it was all typed up nicely!

Oooops! Calyptraids from unusual locations - Cook Islands in this case - often turn out to be imposters.

Friday, February 8, 2013

Last night the Marea Roja, Panama’s national football team
tied Costa Rica 2-2 in their struggle to qualify for the 2014 World Cup.

And this morning it seems that even nature is trying to show
support for the team. Go Panama!

We had a great view from the lab as this intense algal bloom
developed along the edge of the causeway.We started to see it at low tide in the very shallow water.

Noctiluca occurs in shallow water all around the world

Looking at the cells through the micrscope it's easy to identify the single-celled alga Noctiluca, a dinoflagellate.

This big cells are giants among single-celled
organisms - reaching up to 2 mm across.
You can usually only see one of the flagella (which it uses to feed) moving
slowly back and forth across the cell. They look like pigtails.

Unlike a lot of dinoflagellates which are often highly
toxic, Noctiluca appears not to make
toxins.Nevertheless the blooms can
secrete high concentrations of ammonia and deprive the local water of oxygen,
so these blooms are sometimes associated with fish kills. Luckily we haven’t seen any dead fish.

The orange color of our bloom dissipated by the end of the day.
But we still had the chance to check out their impressive
bioluminescence.

We had fun shaking tubes of algae in the darkroom.The blue-green glow was bright enough to photograph

You can see the individual cells glowing as waves hit the rocks at night!

About Us

Research in the Collin Lab focuses on the evolution of life histories and development of marine invertebrates. Our current work uses marine slipper limpets (Calyptraeidae) to try to understand the evolutionary loss and possible reacquisition of feeding larvae.
The Collin Lab is located in Panama City, Panama, at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute's Naos Marine Laboratories, but our field work takes us to various other countries in the Americas.
Using our blog we hope to give you an introduction to the faces in the Collin Lab, as well as a taste of the kinds of projects we are working on and the adventures we have while doing them.
http://www.stri.si.edu/
http://www.stri.si.edu/sites/collinlab/
Some of this material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number (IOS 1019727). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.